


Spirit Vessel

by caprigender



Category: Campaign (Podcast), Campaign: Skyjacks (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Haunting, Live show references, is it sick orphan pranks or is there actual paranormal activity going on here?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24921250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caprigender/pseuds/caprigender
Summary: There are at least five haunted dolls on the skyship Uhuru. Nodoze is familiar with at least three of them.
Kudos: 6





	Spirit Vessel

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a few hundred words and got a little bit out of hand  
> Didn't even get to the scene I originally wanted to write but hey that's just how it is sometimes

He didn’t sleep much. With a name like “Nodoze” you might be inclined to think he never slept at all. This was not true, but it was a rumor Nodoze never outright denied. The reputation had served him well in the past, on other ships with less trustworthy crews where Nodoze had first learned to be a light sleeper. In the few hours he did manage to catch every few days he slept upright, propped against a wall for support and with both eyes unfocused but open. On the old ship Rambler the trick had saved his life more than once. Here on the Uhuru, it saved him from the mostly harmless pranks of countless sick orphans.

He wasn’t sure the tactic was working much anymore.

The doll stared at him with cold, glassy eyes unfocused and unfathomable. It had not been there an hour ago when he had started his nap. His unconscious mind had not woken when it somehow made its way up to him and started the staring contest he surely could not win.

Nodoze hadn’t screamed when he’d woken up to the uncanny eye contact, but it had startled him. His heart raced. He’d nearly jumped out of his skin. He focused on his breathing, deep soothing breaths that would calm him down, and looked more closely at the doll. She had carefully curly hair, a ruffled maroon birding jumpsuit, the kind that an aristocrat from Aruum would wear for a teatime griffin ride, and a coal smudge under her left eye, trailing across to her nose that was certainly not part of her original design. Unexpected as she was, he did recognize her.

Nodoze sighed. “Ah, it’s you again. Can’t say I appreciate the way you keep showing up like this.”

The doll did not answer. It stood solidly and silently and stared with all the stalwart snobbery Nodoze expected of a fine lady stuck on a pirate ship.

“If you find this place so unsuitable to your liking perhaps you should leave us at the next port,” Nodoze replied. “Take your friends with you, find an old mansion or an antiques shop or-“ he felt a cold prickling at the base of his neck. The air swirled with a seething hatred, a bitter malice, uncontainable disdain.

Nodoze swallowed around the lump in his throat. “Or if you insist on staying, then by all means, please stay.” He thought he managed to control the acid bitterness of his voice. “But this thing you and yours do,” he waved his hand at the doll, hopefully indicating the strange staring contests, the moving to inconvenient and unexpected places, “this needs to stop.”

-

It did not stop.

Less than a week had gone by when Nodoze woke to simple grey eyes and a mischievous painted on smile.

“Good morning, Miss Polka-dots,” he greeted the little clown doll that should not have been. “Anything interesting happen while I was away?”

The clown did not answer. He had not expected that she would.

Nodoze looked down to his feet. His boots had been unlaced and the hemp cords were tied together in a simple knot. Shoddy craftwork if this were a prank by sick orphans, but for an entity without functioning thumbs or fingers, well...

“You don’t give me much credit, Miss Dots,” he sighed, “Did you really think that I would fall for this trick twice?”

Miss Dots smiled as if to say “I’ll never tell” or “Ain’t I just the worst?” or “Of course I think you’re that stupid, silly billy.” It was a wicked and vindictive smile with just the slightest hint of otherworldly glee like that of a thwarted trickster god. HooHoo, mortal, dance and suffer at the behest of my mischievous ministrations. I am the paper cut in the divot between your fingers. I am the eyelash that you cannot fish out of your eye. I am the popped blister, the wobbly desk chair, I am every minor inconvenience you have ever faced and will ever face. Look upon me and despair. I am Miss Dots, bringer of small annoyances and one day you shall know the true meaning of discomfort. 

Or maybe she just smiled like a face that was painted for that purpose.

Nodoze leaned down and began to pick apart the mess that had been made of his laces. No time for nonsense. He had work he had to do.

-

At least the husk doll never paid him any mind.

The husk doll has no face. The husk doll is barely a doll. The husk doll has no eyes and yet it sees you in all your flawed and shivering incorrectness. The husk doll sees where you have been and where you are going. The husk doll does not move and yet you see it in many places around the ship. The husk doll has always been tied to the helm. The husk doll has always sat on the top left shelf of the cargo hold. The husk doll has always nestled in the mouth of the furnace, glowing hot and yet somehow never crumbling like the wrapped and bundled corn fibers ought to do.

The husk doll was never on board the Uhuru. The husk doll staked its claim. Has taken its claim.

There was a boy named Pierre. Nodoze can remember that he was once on the crew. He’d had a bunk, he scampered around underfoot, his name was on the manifest. Nodoze can remember Pierre’s voice, strained and high pitched, as he asked about the corn husk doll and did Nodoze know who had made it?

“We don’t talk about that one,” he’d answered and he hadn’t known that was a rule until he’d said it out loud.

But it was too late and the rule had already been broken.

-

The Aruum bird rider found him scrubbing down the stalls of the coop. Newspaper and bird shit and rotting uneaten meat crusted the bars. It wasn’t the most glamorous job on the ship but it needed to get done. Nodoze scraped at them with a spade, scrubbed with a brush, doused them in collected rainwater. He turned to retrieve another bucket and the red of a riding suit caught his eye. Ruffles and curls and a cold dead stare.

“Hello Ms. Rider, nice to see you again.” This was not technically a lie. Ms. Rider was an unsettling presence but at least this time the doll had arrived while he was awake and had the courtesy not to stare at him. Instead the little figure stood on stiff limbs turned toward the cage where Lucas sat and preened and cooed. Nodoze grabbed the bucket of water and turned back to his work. “Be careful how far you lean in, Ms. Rider. The bars are widely spaced and I don’t think they’d catch you if you slipped and fell.” 

He felt a wave of furious indignation. It wrapped around him in an unsung chorus of “You dare threaten me?!”

Nodoze sighed. “It was no threat, Ms. Rider. Just a simple observation.” The outrage faded and he returned to the mundane and unending task of scrubbing and scraping and washing.

It was dull work. It was safe work. Well, it was safe work if you didn’t get mauled by a griffin raptor or tumble and fall into a hatch door with a weakened latch. He tried to turn the repetitive motion and the ache in his muscles into a rhythm that matched a sky shanty he knew. He’d tried a few rounds of “Johnny bay’s sparrowhawk,” “set your seasons by the Swiftwells” and “A quartermaster’s greatest fear” and was just starting up a verse of “the bully boys of Burzha Nyth” when his attention was pulled back to Ms. Rider.

The doll had moved. The delicately molded hands leaned against the door of Lucas’ cage and their head was tilted up at the gorgeous bird. As Nodoze watched he felt an overwhelming sadness swell in his heart and a longing that he could tell did not begin in his own body.

“Who are you?” He almost asked. But the little porcelain figure had never answered such specific questions of his before. There was no reason to believe they would be able or inclined to do so now. And of course, the more accurate form of that question was in the past tense. “Who were you?” didn’t seem like a question he had enough familiarity to ask. 

Nodoze looked back at the unending task before him. Three and a half more bird cages to scrub out. He did not relish the thought of continuing.

Well, that was what fresh meat was for anyways, wasn’t it?

“You! Skyjack!”

“Y-yes sir?”

“It’s… Pliff, right?”

“Uh, yes that’s my name, sir.”

“Have you ever cleaned an aviary before, Pliff?”

“No, sir?”

“Well, you’ll learn on the job.”

The young man spluttered excuses but Nodoze ignored him. He hitched a saddle to the peacock while Pliff stumbled around the cleaning supplies, dropping buckets and fumbling tools. Lucas shifted and ruffled his feathers in excitement. No-doze grabbed a saddle pack from the tack room and restrung it, strapping the bag across his chest.

“Well, come on,” he said, “if we’re going for a ride we have to do this quick.”

Pliff coughed in surprise and squeaked at him. “Are you talking to me, sir?”

“No,” Nodoze answered. In one fluid movement he scooped up Ms. Rider, placed her in the pack on his chest, and swung one gangly leg up over Lucas’ back. “It’s easiest to clean these things when the birds are out, so you should probably start with this cage,” he advised, “oh and Pliff? One more thing,”

Pliff nodded. “Yes sir?”

“Don’t tell Gable.”

He pulled the lever and felt the rush of wind as the three of them dropped away into the sun bright abyss.

Nodoze felt a strange lightness in his heart. The griffin leveled out, spreading enormous white wings over grey clouds and the patches of land so far below. There was a bubbling well of laughter in his stomach and it poured forth from his mouth in a waterfall of delight. Uncharacteristic. Unsettling. Not entirely unwelcome. Nodoze was not a man who laughed often. And while he would admit to enjoying a good griffin ride as much as the next skyjack, there was an unusual enthusiasm filling every corner of his body as he steered Lukas towards a bank of clouds.

They dipped into the mist and the world grew soft around the edges. Drops of water beaded and tumbled over Lukas' back, gliding like tumbled glass over pearly feathers. No-doze glanced down at his passenger. The water clung to the cold painted clay of her face. As it streamed back in the wake of their windfall it almost looked like tears of joy.

-

He only ever heard the singing at night: a five part harmony that he knew better than to investigate. The voices would ebb and flow in the breeze, interrupted by the rippling rustle of sails and the dull roar of the furnace.

“Gone are the days when it was easy to ride,  
Singing way-hay-ho-  
But the years haven’t withered my joy and my pride,  
Singing way-hay-ho“ 

Hopeful words sung with melancholy slowness in voices weak and wispy. And yet somehow they had the strength to carry across high altitude winds.

There had been a time when that sound would have rattled him. His body would have shivered and rebelled against the bone-deep weariness that he built into the core of himself every day. The strangeness of it all would have been enough to keep him awake. But unrelenting strangeness must become commonplace eventually, and in the end, whatever/whoever was singing they sounded absolutely lovely.

The lamplight flickered and that was common enough to be comforting as well. Nodoze leaned back against the bulkhead and let his eyes unfocus. Just a few minutes, he would take just a few minutes rest and he would be fine.

Nodoze hummed along under his breath, just catching the end of the familiar sky shanty, “-and never be hurried but always on time,  
Singing way-hay-ho,  
Singing way-hay-ho…”


End file.
